A new documentary takes a behind-the-scenes look at a fitful 2009 architectural competition.

The documentary follows an architectural competition for a national museum in Andorra, involving Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel (above), and Dominique Perrault.

All images courtesy Office for Strategic Spaces (OSS)

Architecture’s great shame is that it is a profession of screamers. A culture of casual cruelty—especially at the expense of underpaid and overworked interns on whose recently educated technical expertise the maintenance of any firm’s cutting edge depends—is not hard to find behind the architectural scenes. Some of this violence results when the artistic and anxious souls who are among those drawn to architecture find themselves at the top of organizational charts, contending with management dilemmas for which no part of their education or socialization has prepared them. Some of it might be old-fashioned bullying by members of what is still largely a boys’ club—either to reassert jock or butch status in the potentially nerd- or femme-skewing practice of quietly drawing imaginary buildings, or by principals who recover at the expense of their staff the loss of face they feel after charming clients whose economic power is ever further beyond their own. And some of it might reflect the cycles of abuse embedded in architectural education’s nineteenth-century conventions of ritual hazing, “all-nighter” physical endurance tests, and faintly sadomasochistic “shooting gallery” reviews.

Much of this shame is on display in The Competition, a new documentary directed by Spanish architect Angel Borrego Cubero, about a 2009 contest—entered by established celebrity architects Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, and Dominique Perrault—to design a smallish national museum for the tiny European country of Andorra. Architectural competitions of the open and anonymous kind, in which any entry’s visible excellence might alone vault it into being built, represent the highest ideals of the profession. This film documents the other kind of competition: invited, limited, sociable, and thus potentially corruptible and corrupting. One apparent condition of the contest’s last round was participation in the film itself; the only hint of self-congratulation in this otherwise restrained production (no talking heads, no narration, no music) is an intertitle noting Foster’s withdrawal following this development....Continue Reading

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